Watch This Snake Ruin a Timelapse of a Robin's Nest

One cool thing about photographing nature is that you never know what will happen. Just ask YouTuber Tan Nguyen, who, according to IFL Science, set up a GoPro above a robin's nest to capture a timelapse of its babies hatching. Instead of witnessing the miracle of new life, Nyugen got to see the exact opposite when a snake slithered its way up the tree to dine on the unhatched eggs.

Because of the shakiness of the timelapse footage, it's hard to tell if the mother robin leaves the nest because of the snake's arrival or if the snake was lying in wait until she did (or if Nguyen edited the footage). Regardless, the snake wastes virtually no time before it pokes its head into the nest and starts swallowing the bright blue eggs whole. It even hangs out for a while at the crime scene to allow the free meal to digest. The short clip ends before the mother bird returns, which is probably for the best.

Kate MccGwire, Orchis, 2012

Tessa Angus

Kate MccGwire is a British sculptor with an unusual medium: feathers. Her surreal, undulating works often take the form of installations—the feathers spilling out of a drain, a stove, a crypt wall—or stand-alone sculptures in which antique bell jars, cabinets, or trunks contain otherworldly shapes.

MccGwire developed her obsession with feathers after moving to a studio barge on the Thames in 2006, as she explains in a video from Crane.tv recently spotlighted by Boing Boing. The barge was near a large shed full of feral pigeons, whose feathers she would spot on her way to work. "I started picking them up and laying them out, collecting them," she remembers. "And after about two weeks I had like 300 feathers." At the time, concerns about bird flu were rife, which made the feathers seem "dangerous as well as beautiful."

When not supplied by her own next-door menagerie, the feathers for her artwork come from a network of racing pigeon societies all over the UK, who send her envelopes full every time the birds molt. Farmers and gamekeepers also send her fallen feathers from birds such as magpies, pheasants, and roosters.

The cultural associations around birds are a big part of what inspires MccGwire. “The dove is the symbol of peace, purity, and fertility," she told ArtNews in 2013, "but it’s exactly the same species as a pigeon—which everyone regards as being dirty, foul, a pest.”

The same duality is present in her own work, which she frequently shares on her Instagram account. “I want to seduce by what I do—but revolt in equal measure. It’s really important to me that you’ve got that rejection of things you think you know for sure.”

You can see some pictures of MccGwire's work, and watch the video from Crane.tv, below.

Prehistoric Earth was filled with all kinds of impressively scary animals. But one category of avians, an extinct clade called Phorusrhacidae, was so fierce that they're today nicknamed "terror birds," as the latest video from PBS Eons explains below.

Phorusrhacidae was a group of large, flightless, carnivorous birds that roamed Earth for about 60 million years, beginning in the early Cretaceous Period. Over time, they evolved into 25 different species. Some of these birds were likely scavengers, but others lusted for blood, judging from fossils that revealed their physical makeup.

Sharp beaks allowed some terror birds to rip their prey's flesh straight from the bone, and their curved claws were ideal for stabbing. Even their skeletons were natural weapons, with strong legs powerful enough to crack bone. If these features weren't terrifying enough, experts think that the birds may have also subdued their still-living meals by lifting them up and repetitively smashing them against the ground.

One of the largest species among these birds was Titanis walleri, which once roamed the coastal plains of what's today Texas and Florida after crossing a land bridge from South America around 5 million years ago. Learn how it came to America, and why it went extinct, by watching the video below.